The story on these pistons, as told to me by Jack Wheeler, is as follows:
Jack developed this domed shape along with Paul Trapp in Westville, IL.
Jack had them in his car when he won the national championship, and when
they tore down his engine for inspection, somebody tipped off Cosworth.
Cosworth offered Jack a free set of pistons if he would loan them one of
the originals to copy. That's what he did, and he got his free set. Then
somebody else bought a set of Cosworths and had Venolia copy them.
I bought a set of Venolias six or seven years ago on a quantity buy like
you are going to do. They lasted for five years and would have lasted
longer except for an unfortunate but educational incident.
I was putting my engine back together after a failed head gasket cooked too
many parts. My next race was in a week. While assembling the engine, I
found that the rings would not go into the ring grooves on the pistons. I
had purchased DeVess rings, not realizing that Venolia pistons have ring
grooves sized in millimeters, not inches.
I couldn't find anything in the USA. Nobody in town had the tools any more
to re-groove the pistons. As a last resort, I took the rings to a machine
shop and asked if they could make them thinner. With some real trickery in
tooling, they stayed late after normal quitting time and ground them down
(is it any wonder that I like Southwick?) and I ran them for two years.
When my worn-out engine was finally belching great clouds of blowby and I
rebuilt it, I found that the ground side of the rings, being not as
smoothly finished as the rest of the ring, and having its case hardness
ground off, had severely worn both the rings and the piston grooves. No
surprise.
That caused me to buy new pistons, copies of the copies, from Wiseco. they
are first class quality. At the time Venolia had a rather high minimum
quantity but it may be lower by now, what with the performance parts
industry being in a near-depression.
I was surprised that the rings appeared to be case hardened -- I say they
were just because of the wear pattern I observed, but maybe they are not.
All that aside, can you get Wiseco to supply lightweight pins, like maybe
tapered inside?
At 08:32 PM 1/26/04 +0000, Joe Boruch wrote:
>I am looking to have some custom TR3/4 pistons made by Wiseco. They will
>be 87mm with a 165/1000 inch pop-up. They will have the underside of the
>dome lightened as well as the rest of the piston. They will use Wiseco
>rings. The catch is, they want a minimum order of 8, and that is 3 more
>that what I was looking to buy at this time. As of this time, we are
>looking at about $111 per piston with pins and rings (plus shipping). Is
>anyone interested in splitting an order?
>
>Another alternative is that there was some discussion about Venolia
>pistons a while back on the list. Do they have a pop-up piston and will
>they do small orders?
>
>Joe(B)
>
>________________________________________________________________
uncle jack
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